How Much Does Company Alignment REALLY Matter For Developers?

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

Hey folks, we're going to the experienced dev subreddit. This one is actually almost the same as what I just filmed at the tail end of uh the thoughts I had coming together, but um this Redditor was asking about how important is it that you align as a developer with the mission of the company that you're working at? And I think it's a really good topic. I kind of naturally was going there, like I said in the last video I was just recording. Um, and this kind of thing I think is something that I I think about a lot and um I don't know, maybe it's like one of the undertones I try to keep sharing in videos uh and and content. So the framing here is like this person was saying they used to work at this company and um I guess it was like in in the music industry and for whatever reason uh you know their own interest and stuff.

What is this person doing? Sorry, we're we're on this street and this person is just not driving. It's very weird. Um, this individual had worked in for a company that was in the music industry and so they throughout their work they were really enjoying that. Do I have to honk at this person? Come on. This is insanity. Um, I can't even speak because every time I go to speak this person in front of me is doing something stupid. And so this person was working in the music industry over time. I guess that you know company whatever had issues they they were saying there's some structural issues and they move on to go work in some other company and they're saying the problem is that like maybe they didn't actually realize how much the previous company's like mission and alignment um to that space like that

that they really had and like how much that was keeping them engaged in the work they're doing because now they're saying like I just don't give a about what my company does and it's making it really difficult to like to be enthusiastic about doing work. And so, like I said, I I I think this is a really important topic. I want to acknowledge that I can imagine that some viewers simply just don't care about this right now. And I think that's especially why it's important to kind of talk about it because I do think in your career and in your life, there's going to be different things that you focus on and value. And it's not for me or anyone else to tell you what you should and should not value. Like those are things that um are shaped by your life experiences, your morals, like your you as a person, right?

Um not for me or anyone else to say. So, you know, if you're early in your career or you have not even, you know, started your your professional career, I get it. Like your your focus, your goal and and everything that you're doing right now may just be like, get my foot in the door. I don't give a about anything else. And again, not for me to tell you you're not allowed to think that way or anything like that. I understand. Okay. So my my point of wanting to talk through this is that if we zoom out and we think about our lives and our careers like what is uh what is the impact of this topic right so I just want to give you that framing so that you don't feel like I'm trying to make you feel a certain way about you know

where you're at in your career this stuff changes over time and so and even the the specifics about what I'm going to talk about will change over time the things that you value, the things that get you engaged. Um, even if you are trying to optimize your career around those things, they will change over time. So, I I thought it was really interesting that this person put this together because um I I feel like we don't hear it enough where people are talking about um sort of like what what the business does uh for where they're working and and why that gets them engaged, right? So, for this person, it happened to be with the music industry. Like for me personally, like I listen to music, but like I don't I don't think I care enough about it to for that to be like a really exciting thing for me.

Now, if I worked at a company that did things related to music, I don't know. Like I've never done it before, so I can't right now. I can't imagine myself being like, "Oh, hell yeah." Like that's a thing I want. But if I were to do it, maybe I would learn for myself that like, hey, this is something that is like super cool, super interesting. U there's alignment. I don't specifically know what it would be. Like I don't know, maybe it's supporting artists and stuff like that. And maybe I find through that that I get a lot of enjoyment out of that. Um like that could be a thing. I just I don't on the surface I don't think that is for me. For this person, they were able to find that. And so very interesting that they had this type of experience where they were like I I do feel this alignment.

It is uh engaging. I feel good about it. And now they they simply don't have that. And how much how much of your work experience like what you're doing on the job is able to fill that void. I don't think that like I don't think that everyone has to feel that way, right? That you have to optimize your life around your career being the thing that that gives you um fulfillment. I don't think that you have to live your life that way. But what I was saying in the last video and I've said this before and I will continue to say it is that uh for me personally, I do enjoy working. like I like being productive, feeling productive and I like making progress towards things. So for me, my my career and my ability to work is something that I I do want to optimize in terms of long-term for fulfillment.

And I would if for people that kind of don't know or they're they're just unsure, I would say like my framing for this is that most of our lives, our adult lives will be working, right? We spend many many years working. And so if unless you have a shortcut out of that, which maybe is also a strategy, for me, I I would like to make sure that for the majority of that time, it's optimized around fulfillment. Now, it's tricky because I want to again acknowledge that some people listening or watching might say like like cool, sounds nice on paper, dude, but like it's just it's just work, right? It's just work. And I will say I'm sure for many many many percentage of the people that are listening or watching may not have had the opportunity to work at a place where you have felt otherwise.

So, I get it. Like, absolutely, your lived experience has, you know, given you evidence that it's just work. It's not engaging. There's no reason to for it to need to be engaging. Like, who cares? Like, it's work. You got stuff outside of work to be more fulfilling and engaging. And I don't again, I don't disagree with that, right? I think in my my meta point is like just sort of maximizing for fulfillment. And if you happen to be spending most of your life at work, to me I'm like that checks out, like maximize your fulfillment that way. But of course, if you can minimize the amount you need to work and get maximum fulfillment in your life outside of it, then hell yeah, that's the end of end of the day. It's like fulfillment is the is the goal. So for me at least, I I I anchor that around work.

And so with this person talking about music industry to I think they were saying now they're kind of in some kind of just like some legacy tech in some space where they're just not feeling excited. They're like should I be shopping around for like should I be interviewing getting my resume brushed up? And like my take is like yeah like doesn't mean that you have to rush out of there right if if if work is okay like you're getting paid you're being you know uh fairly you feel like you're treated fairly um and ultimately it's not like a negative experience then I would say like remain there but I would recommend shopping around like you don't have anything to lose except the time you put into shopping around which is yours to decide. So, I would encourage people like if you can make the time search, right?

I I realize again it's easier said than done because that is one more thing to have to go do, spend time on. You could be doing other things that are more enjoyable. So, I get it. But I would say like from a long-term perspective, I I think it's important to be trying to look for opportunities that are more fulfilling. Right? So for me in my career in the last video, and I've talked about this before, like I worked uh before Microsoft at a digital forensics company and was very fortunate to have got into that space and worked at the company I did. um things just really lined up. I would love to say it's all because it was like all on me for perfect planning and f like no too much uh serendipity there for for me to take any credit. So I will not pretend to take credit for how all those things lined up.

The uh reality is that that work was extremely fulfilling. And so I I do genuinely find it difficult for me to envision something else I could be doing in my career that would feel equally as fulfilling. So it's kind of funny because it was like a blessing to have such an opportunity early in my career and almost like a curse because it almost feels like anything after that simply will won't line up. And I'm not saying this is uh you know for someone else with a similar experience that it means the same thing. It's just the thing that I found very engaging and fulfilling through that work. I don't I genuinely don't know if I will match that just because of the you know the perceived impact from my perspective. Now like I I work at Microsoft right now and the scale of what we do is orders and orders and orders of magnitude more scale.

So the numeric impact that we get to have just purely based on scale affects more people, right? So like that's a really cool thing and we're doing things at scale. So there's very interesting challenges like seemingly tiny things can have very big impact. We were talk just to give you an example we were talking the other day on one of my teams around um some C optimization. And so we were talking about saving like, you know, on the order of like 1% allocations for memory for something and and like the impact that that actually has on on the service that's running. And it's like it's it's crazy that doing small things can have such a big impact on on the service that we're running. And because of that, because of the scale at which it runs can therefore have an impact across you know many many millions of users.

So these things are just very different and it's not like one is right or one is wrong. But when we reflect on things for ourselves what is more fulfilling and I like I said a little bit earlier it's tricky because these things change for you over time. They might remain mostly consistent and I would suspect as you get older they're mostly consistent but the weight of these things may shift right like for example like I am very motivated to be able to have a higher income right the reason and like that's been the case for a long time the reason for that though is that I think about if I have financial freedom then that should afford me more opportunities to go focus on whatever will give me uh you know more fulfillment sort of the freedom to go pick and choose and not have to be like okay um yes but I need to think about the the salary or something I can just kind of remove that factor.

So again, how you approach and try to to optimize these things will be very different. But I do think that you know the what your company or where you're working like the company um what their mission is and what you're doing can make a dramatic difference on on your engagement and therefore your effectiveness. One of the I haven't talked about this in a a pretty long while, but um as an engineering manager, this is one of the things that like I try to make sure that is coming up with people on the team. So fully recognizing, I'm just going to use an example, right? Where I'm at at Microsoft is the routing plane for Office 365. I don't manage the whole team, but I manage some parts of it. And so the parts that I manage, I I absolutely can understand if like engineers on those sub teams aren't 100% enthusiastic about every single thing we do every day, right?

It's just it's the reality of work. We try our best to make sure that the work is interesting, engaging, that kind of thing. But there's always going to be some stuff where you're like, "Ah, yeah, like kind of sucks. I don't want to do that." Like no one I don't think I know many people or any people that love fixing bugs. Inevitably there's going to be bugs. So like they got to get fixed. And if we got to go fix things like that might not be exciting for you. I get it. So I try not to make sure that someone's entire work life is like fixing bugs. That would be awful. Um but I you know I want to go beyond that. So even with feature development if we say hey there's this feature we want to do and like and here's what it does.

I think that in groups of engineers it's uh easy to focus on like what we're doing and how we're doing it right like we're going to talk about the implementation we're going to talk about the architecture we're going to try to optimize things we're going to talk about the constraints and I think a lot of the time because we're focused on those things as engineers that is the focal point and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that but The part that I want to make sure that I can mix in for people on my teams is why we're doing it. Why? Why does this work matter? Right? It's oh, it's because it moves this number to that number if we optimize it properly. Like that's a measure, but that might not be why. Like that is not a good motivation for why. So what is the reason?

Why do we care about that number going from, you know, from point A to point B? Why does that actually matter? Or why are we building this feature if it's not like it's not going to say improve performance or like reduce latency or whatever like why does this work stream matter? And I try to make sure and I'm not saying I do a perfect job of this by any means, but I try to make sure as an engineering manager that comes up in conversations. I've told engineers on my team, look, like I I want to make sure at any point in time you understand why. And if you ever don't, I do want you to ask like I'll do my best to remind you or to tell you in the beginning when we're talking about work streams, but you know, I want you to feel

comfortable that if at any point you're like, "Cool, I know what we're doing, but I'm not sure I understand why." It doesn't have to be a challenging thing like, "I think this is dumb. I don't know why we're doing it. It could just literally be like, I don't I don't think I understand the bigger picture of why we're doing this. So, I've told people, if you don't, please just let me know. I It's because I have not done my job effectively. So, it's okay. I want to do a better job explaining why. And so, I often find that when people get a little bit more behind the scenes for why. It doesn't have to be like earthshattering, right? It doesn't have to be, but I do think that it's important as you're sharing why along the way that people see the bigger picture about how they're contributing to a bigger mission.

It's it's very easy when you're, you know, hyperfocused on different work streams that you're like, I see the feature. I see the what and the how. But if you don't get the opportunity to zoom out and see why, I think that sometimes it can uh can cause people to lose interest because they just don't see the, you know, the the impact that they're having over time. Numbers are one thing, but if you don't understand the meaning behind the numbers like and how that translates into users and uh ultimately like you know the the mission of whatever your team is doing, then it's feels kind of lost. So, I don't know. Like it's I I do think this concept of like why we're doing the work we're doing can dramatically affect your effectiveness, your engagement. This this Redditor who wrote this post, it's it's pretty to me it's pretty clear like they're going cool.

like they maybe they have interesting constraints, maybe it's interesting technology, but if they're not even aligned with what the business is doing and they're finding that they're not engaged in the work, like the reality is, and it's not this person's fault, like they're probably not going to do their best work cuz they just at the end of the day, they don't give a right? The the only motivation is okay, like it helps me keep my paycheck, which is maybe fine for some people. This goes back to what I said earlier, which is I I would think and I would at least for myself, I know that I want my career to be fulfilling, the work I'm doing to be fulfilling because that's a big part of how I'm spending my life. So, as I'm getting close to home here, I'm not moving right this moment, but um once this light turns green, uh you know, maybe the the thing to reflect on is like what does that look like for you?

Right? For some people it like maybe the work they're doing for the company or the industry they're in maybe maybe that doesn't matter as much because the thing that really gets you excited is like I'm just making up examples but like maybe you're just like there's really challenging technical problems here and like I'm getting like unlimited opportunities for cool technical challenges like hell yeah that's the thing I want or where I work maybe the industry or whatever like I don't give a about. Um but uh the company is so I'm just again making up examples so focused on making sure employees have the opportunity to learn uh technology learn whatever like they they really support it and because I really like to learn that's really fulfilling for me I really get a good opportunity for that here. So do like see if you can do this reflection about the things that that are engaging for you and disengaging for you and kind of compare that to where you're at.

I mean you you might even start with where you're at and see what things are engaging and disengaging. Try to think about the industry. Try to think about outside of work. Like what things do you do you love? It doesn't mean you have to go do something in that industry, but like you might be doing things outside of work and you're like, "Wow." Like, um, maybe you volunteer somewhere or something. You're like, "That actually for me is like the most fulfilling thing I can do." No, no, don't don't don't do it, buddy. This guy's going to ride his bike through a advanced green. So you you may find that once you're exploring those and you're like, "Okay, well that's the thing that gets me engaged." Cool. It doesn't have to be exactly the same industry or the same mechanism, but is there a way that you can you can say like, "Look, I I actually do really enjoy being able to give back in these spaces or whatever the motivator is.

Can you align work to something similar to that so that work for you is more engaging and more fulfilling? So, I will leave you with that as I back into my driveway here. And a friendly reminder that if you have questions, by the I'm not staring into the camera trying to use my mirror. Um, you have questions you want to answer, leave them below in the comments. software engineering career related habit to try and answer and uh otherwise you can go to codecommute.com you can submit questions anonymously that way um I just get an email for myself and whatever you write so uh the more you write there uh the better because it helps me have context and I can try my best to make a video response for you so thank you so much for watching I will see you in the next one take There.